The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker

What a gigantic treat and surprise this book turned out to be. When I say gigantic, I mean exactly that. It is a VERY oversized book with hundreds and hundreds of pages. This is not a book you can hold up and read lying down in your bed. With that said, the New Yorker has produced some of the best comics in the world, be they political or satirical or simply taking a rather gimlet look at what passed for modern society (at the time). The comics start back many, many decades ago and follow through up until the current time. I decided to savor it by only reading the comics about 10 pages at a time, then put it away. It took me approximately 80 hours to go through the whole thing. If you like comics, it doesn't get any better.

I personally love The New Yorker cartoons, and they're the first things I read when I get the magazine. Therefore, the prospect of being able to have every cartoon ever published was very exciting. The best part of this collection is that you can navigate to whatever cartoons you want to see, or you can simply browse through ones you have never seen before and discover a veritable treasure trove. One thing that I noticed was that many themes recur throughout the years and that some things that were relevant 50 years ago are still relevant now. Even in terms of politics and the way other countries feel towards America. Whoever rated this very low doesn't know what they're talking about. Sure the book is big, but if you wanted to read the cartoons in bed you could easily sit there with a laptop and peruse the cd-roms. Also, to those who said that the cartoons were low resolution, I noticed that in Adobe Acrobat where the cd opens, they give you the option to zoom in, therefore enabling you to read the caption. I observed this within minutes of opening the cd on my computer for the first time. I don't know whether other people just don't have this or were too impatient to realize it was there. In any case, I highly recommend this book to whoever likes New Yorker cartoons, or enjoys witty humor.

The book is BIG and wonderful. It not only sits on my coffee table, but with a few legs, it could be my coffee table. The best part however are the two CDs. No way could one volume hold all the cartoons ever in the New Yorker. The CDs are great because they can be sorted, searched and you can even print out any cartoon you really like. Do you have any idea how many cartoons Charles Addams drew for this magazine?(715 in the 1929-64 CD alone) You can look at them, and anyone else, and sort in many many ways. I got 2017 hits in the same CD by typing "war" into the search field. What a resource! Just the thing for a winter's evening. The book will even keep your lap warm.

This is pretty much the definition of the phrase, "Be careful what you ask for..." OK, the massive coffee table book of New Yorker cartoons is one thing -- and a good thing at that. But the two CD's with every cartoon ever published in the New Yorker are just evil. Drop the CD into your computer, pick any year from 1925 to 2004 -- and suddenly you're browsing around 900 cartoons from that year! Hours pass easily as you click through literally many tens of thousands of New Yorker cartoons. The cartoons are in Acrobat (pdf) format, and you need Acrobat version 6 or later, which will require some people to upgrade. The disk is readable by PC's and Mac's ( OS X or later, only because there's no version 6 for Mac OS 9.x or lower.) The Acrobat interface also allows you to search by cartoonist name, which is a huge boon. This is a world class gift -- and my advice is to not take the chance someone will forget to buy it for you. I'm giving four and already have one for myself...

If you have read the New Yorker Magazine then you really will need no prodding in purchasing this fine set...for those of you who have never experienced New Yorker cartoons, I have two words for you...CHARLES ADDAMS....Charles Addams, the creator of the ADDAMS FAMILY, has many of his finest cartoons housed within this book and CDs....His brand of macabre humor served as the foundation, which Larson, Wilson, Kliban, and the rest, built their careers upon....this intro to Charles Addams work is only one of the many highlights in this set as you will find many other artists of high quality here, some of whom share Addams' dark style....this set, along with THE COMPLETE FAR SIDE, by Larson are the rosetta stones of illustrative humor... One note: Because there were so many cartoons (well over 60,000) you do not have them all present in the book, so only a rather large sampling is contained within...the CD's are where you will find the complete cartoons...but as it states in the book's forward, the tactile look and feel of handling the pages of cartoons is much better than reading them on a pc monitor which is why the book was produced and not just sold as a CD ROM only set...I could not agree more.... strongly recommended!

What a great book. I've always thought there was a doctoral dissertation lurking in cartoons on the pages of the New Yorker, and now I'm sure of it. Look at the difference in style and content across the decades, look at the cartoons that were funny in 1950 and see what is still funny now and what has become outdated, look at the vast changes in cartooning! But most of all, just look at all of these thousands, no, tens of thousands of cartoons and have a good time. The book is gold, with its 2,004 cartoons, and the essays about the decades and the artists are very well done, but if the book is gold, then there's platinum in the CDs. One thing - if you're a Mac user, as I am, be aware that you really need OSX to make this work (a detail some purchase sites don't mention).